The Freedom of Science

This is called the development of Christianity. It is this “religious progress,” the same “free Christianity,” that they are now trying to promote by international congresses. The invitation to the “World's Congress for free Christianity and religious progress” at Berlin, in 1910, was signed by more than 130 German professors, including 47 theologians. We have here the development of the dying into the lifeless corpse, the progress of the strong castle into a dilapidated ruin, the advance of the rich man to beggary.

We began our inquiry with the question proposed some years ago by D. Strauss to his brethren-in-spirit: Are we still Christians? We may now quote the answer, which he gives at the conclusion of his own investigation: “Now, I think, we are through. And the result? the reply to my question? – must I state it explicitly? Very well; my conviction is, that if we do not want to make excuses, if we do not want to shift and shuffle and quibble, if yes is to be yes, and no to remain no, in short, if we desire to speak like honest, sincere men, we must confess: we are no longer Christians.”

This is the bitter fruit of autonomous freedom of thinking, which, declining any guidance by faith, recognizes no other judge of truth than individual reason, with all the license and the hidden inclinations that rule it. Protestantism has adopted this freedom of research as its principle; in consistently applying it, Protestantism has completely denatured the Christian religion. If anything can prove irrefutably the monstrosity and cultural incapacity of modern freedom of research, it is the fate of Protestantism. Any one capable of seriously judging serious things must realize here how pernicious this freedom is for the human mind.

Reduced to Beggary

But the loss is even greater. The better class of paganism still clung to the general notion of an existing personal God, of a future life, of a reward after death; it was convinced of the existence of an immortal soul and a future reward, of the necessity of religion, of immutable standards for morals and thought. Has liberal science at least been able to preserve this essential property of a higher paganism? Alas, no! It has lost nearly everything.

No longer has it a personal God. While belief in God may still survive in the hearts of many representatives of this science, it has vanished from science itself. It begs to be excused from accepting any solution of questions, if God is a factor in the solution. The opinion prevails that Kant has forever shattered all rational demonstrations of the existence of God. Yet Kant permits this existence as a “postulate,” which, according to Strauss, “may be regarded as the attic room, where God who has been retired from His office may be decently sheltered and employed.” But now He has been given notice to quit even this refuge. There must be nothing left of Him but His venerable name, which is appropriated by the new apostasy in the guise of pantheism or a masked materialism. Monism is the joint name for it: this is the modern “belief in God.” In days gone by it was frankly called “atheism.”

This disappearance of the old belief in God is noted with satisfaction by modern science: “It is true,” says Paulsen, “the belief in gods … is dying out, and will never be resurrected. Nor is there an essential difference whether many or only one of these beings are assumed. A monotheism which looks upon God as an individual being and lets him occasionally interfere in the world as in something separate from and foreign to him, such a monotheism is essentially not different from polytheism. If one should insist on such conception of theism, then, of course, it will be difficult to contradict those who maintain that science must lead to atheism.”

Therefore God, as a personal being, is dead, and will never come to life again. While there is an enormous exaggeration in these words, they nevertheless glaringly characterize the ideas of the science of which Paulsen is the mouthpiece. It does not want directly to give up the name of God; it serves as a mask to conceal the uncanny features of pantheism and materialism.

“The universe,” we hear often and in many variations, “is the expression of a uniform, original principle, which may be termed God, Nature, primitive force, or anything else, and which appears to man in manifold forms of energy, like matter, light, warmth, electricity, chemical energy, or psychical process… These fundamental ideas of monism are by no means ‘atheistic.’ Many monists in spite of assertions to the contrary believe in a supreme divine principle, which penetrates the whole world, living and operating in everything. Of course, if God is taken to mean a being who exists outside of the world … then it is true we are atheists” (Plate). We have already seen that one can even be a Protestant theologian and yet be satisfied with a “God” of this description.

In the place of God has stepped man, with his advanced civilization, radiant in the divine aureole of the absolute as its highest incarnation. But what has liberal research done even to him? According to the Christian idea, man bears the stamp of God on his forehead: “after My image I have created thee”; in his breast he carries a spiritual soul, endowed with freedom and immortality —gloria et honore coronasti eum. Liberal science pretends to uplift and exalt man; but in reality it strips him of his adornments, one after the other. He is no longer a creature of God because this would contradict science. His birthplace and the home of his childhood are no longer in Paradise, but in the jungles of Africa, among the animals, whose descendent man is now said to be. Liberal science, almost without exception, denies the freedom of will which raises man high above the beast, and as a rule it calls such freedom an “illusion”: of a substantial soul, of immortality, of an ultimate possession of God after death, it frequently, if not always, knows nothing.

Let us take up a handbook of modern Psychology of this kind, Wundt's, for instance. We see at a glance that it is a very learned work. The thirty lectures inform us in minute investigations of the various methods and resources of psychological research. The reader has reached the twentieth lecture, and he asks, how about the soul? The title of the book states that the chapters would treat of the human soul, but so far not a word has been said about it. But there are ten lectures more; he continues to turn over the leaves of the book. He finds beautiful things said about expression and emotions, about instincts in animal and man, about spontaneous actions and other things. At last, the third before the last page of the book, there arises the question, what about the soul, and what does the reader learn? “Our soul is nothing else, but the sum total of our perception, our feeling and our will.” The conviction he held hitherto, that he possessed a substantial, immortal soul, which remains through changing conceptions and sentiments, he sees rejected as “fiction.” The reader learns that, though he may still use the term “soul,” he has no real soul, much less a spiritual soul, least of all an immortal soul. In its stead he is treated to some learned statements about muscular sensations and such things, by way of compensation. Jodl, too, speaks of the “illusions, based upon the old theories about the soul,” and he rejects the dualistic psychology which “mistook an abstract thought, the soul, for a real being, for an immaterial substance”; and which defended this notion “with worthless reasons.”

It is manifest that, together with the substantial soul, immortality is also disposed of. True, here too the word is cautiously retained; but by immortality is now understood perpetuation in the human race, in the ideas of posterity, in “objective spirit,” in the “imperishable value of ethical possessions,” for which the individual has laboured. Some fine words are said about it, as roses are used to cover a grave. Yet, it is only the immortality of the barrel of Regulus, or the Gordian knot in history, the immortality of which the printers' press may partake in the effect of the books it prints. To quote Jodl again: “The fact of the objective spirit, together with the organic connection of the generations to one another, form the scientific reality of what appears in popular, mythological tenets of faith as the idea of personal immortality … and which has been defended by the dualistic psychology with worthless, invalid arguments.” The refutation of these arguments does not bother him. “A refutation of these scholastic arguments is as little needed as a refutation of the belief in the miracles and demons of former centuries is needed by a man standing on the ground of modern natural science.” This reminds one of Haeckel's method. The latter nevertheless found it worth while in his “Weltraetsel” to dispose in thirteen lines of six such arguments, and then to assure the reader that “All these and similar arguments have fallen to the ground.” That the matter in question is an idea that has been the foundation of Christian civilization and ethics for thousands of years, that has led millions to holiness; an idea, indeed, that has been the common property of all nations at all times – this seems to count for very little.

This technique of a superficial speculation, which, devoid of piety, casts everything overboard, finds no trouble in disposing of the entire spiritual world. “No one is capable,” says Jodl again, “of imagining a purely spiritual reality.” This is disposed of. “Since the war between the Aristotle-scholastic and the mechanical method has been waged, spiritual powers have never played any other part in the explanation of the world than that of an unknown quantity in equations of a higher degree, which, unsolvable by methods hitherto prevalent, are only awaiting the superior master and a new technique (sic) in order to disappear” (p. 77 seq.).

With the denial of a personal God and of the immortality of the soul, true religion is abandoned. Of course, there is much said and written about religion in our days: the scientific literature about it has grown to tremendous proportions – to say nothing of newspapers, novels, and plays. One might welcome this as a proof that this world will never entirely satisfy the human heart. But it is also a sign that religion is no longer a secure possession, but has become a problem – that it has been lost. Even on the part of free-thought it is not denied that “only unhappy times will permit the existence of religious problems; and that this problem is the utterance of mental discord.” Yet they do not want to forego religion entirely, for they feel that irreligion is tantamount to degeneration. But what has become of religion? It has been degraded to a vague sentiment and longing, without religious truths and duties, a plaything for pastime.

For Schleiermacher religion is a feeling of simple dependence, though no one knows upon whom he is dependent: according to Wundtreligion consists in “man serving infinite purposes, together with his finite purposes, the ultimate fulfilment whereof remains hidden to his eye,” which probably means something, but I do not know what. Haeckel calls his materialism the religion of the true, good, and beautiful; Jodl even thinks, “As the realm of science is the real, and the realm of art the possible, so the realm of religion is the impossible.”Religion having been degraded to such a level, it is no longer astonishing that religion is attributed even to animals, and in the words of E. von Hartmann, “we cannot help attributing a religious character, as far as the animal is concerned, to the relation between the intelligent domestic animals and their masters.”

What, finally, has become of the old standard of morals? A modern philosopher may answer the question.

Fouillée writes: “In our day, far more so than thirty years ago, morality itself, its reality, its necessity and usefulness, is in the balance… I have read with much concern how my contemporaries are at fundamental variance in this respect, and how they contradict one another. I have tried to form an opinion of all these different opinions. Shall I say it? I have found in the province of morals a confusion of ideas and sentiments to an extent that it seemed impossible to me to illustrate thoroughly what might be termed contemporaneous sophistry” (Le Moralisme de Kant, etc.).

Where is left now to liberal science a single remnant of those great truths on which mankind has hitherto lived, and which it needs for existence? There was a God – but He is gone. There was a life to come, and a supernatural world; they are lost. Man had a soul, endowed with freedom, spirituality, and immortality; he has it no longer. He had fixed principles of reasoning and laws of morals; they are gone. He possessed Christ, full of grace and truth, he possessed redemption and a Church; everything is lost. Burnt to the ground is the homestead. In the blank voids, that cheerful casements were, sits despair; man stands at the grave of all that fortune gave!

The names alone have survived; now and then they speak of God and religion, of Christianity and faith, immortality and freedom; but the words are false, pretending a possession that is lost long since. They are patches from a grand dress, once worn by our ancestors; ruins of the ancestral house that the children have lost. They are still cherished as the memories of better times. People thus acknowledge the irreparable forfeiture which those names denote, without realizing how they pronounce their own condemnation by having destroyed these possessions.16 Dissipaverunt substantiam suam.

The son came to his father. In his heedless anxiety for freedom he would leave the father's house, to get away from restraining discipline and dependence. “Father, give me the portion of the goods that falleth to me.” And he departed into a far country. Soon he had spent all and had nothing to appease his hunger.

Despairing of Truth

These, then, are the achievements liberal research can boast of in the fields of philosophy and religion: Negations and again negations; temples and altars it has destroyed, sacred images it has broken, pillars it has knocked down. Free from Christianity, free from God, free from the life to come and the supernatural, free from authority and faith – it is rich in freedom and negation. But what does it offer in place of all the things it has destroyed? What spiritual goods does it show to the expectant eyes of its confiding followers? The most hopeless things imaginable, namely, despair of all higher truth, mental confusion, and decay. One other brief glance at the consequences and we shall be competent to judge of the fitness of liberal freedom of thought for the civilization of mankind.

As far as it is inspired by philosophy, modern science confesses the principle: “No objective truth can be positively known, at least not in metaphysics”; restless doubt is the lot of the searching intellect. We have amplified this elsewhere in these pages. This result of the modern doctrine of cognition is not infrequently boasted of. It was good enough, say they, for the ancients to live in the silly belief of possessing eternal truth; they were simple and unsuspecting; we know there is in store for man only doubt and everlasting struggle for truth.

“We confess that we do not know whether there are for mankind as a whole, and for the individual, tasks and goals that extend beyond this earthly existence” (Jodl). “There is no scientific philosophy of generally recognized standard, but only in the form of various experiments for the purpose of defining and expressing the harmony and the idea of the active principle; consequently there cannot be a final philosophy, it must be ready at all times to revise any point that previously seemed to have been established” (Paulsen). “Only to dogmatism,”says another, “are the various theories of the world contradictory; to science they are hypotheses of equal value, which, as they are all limited, may exist side by side, the theistic as well as the atheistic, the dualistic, the monistic, and whatever their names may be. Man, who conceives these hypotheses, is master over them all and makes use of them, here of one, there of another, according to the kind of the problem he is occupied with at the time. Thus, he is independent of any view of the world”(L. von Sybel). Again we are told: “There has been formulated a free variety of metaphysical systems, none of them demonstrable… Is it our task, perhaps, to select the true one? This would be an odd superstition; this metaphysical anarchy is teaching, as obviously as possible, the relativity of all metaphysical systems” (W. Dilthey). Therefore, nothing but impressions and opinions, and not the truth; indeed, for the cognition of transcendental, metaphysical truths, they often have only words of disdain.

“The fact should be emphasized,” says G. Spicker, “that philosophy really is devoid of any higher ideal; that, through its doubt of the objective cognizability of things above us, outside and inside of us, it has fallen prey to scepticism, even if philosophers do not admit it and try to evade the issue with the phrase ‘theory of cognition.’ ”

A science cannot sink to a lower level than by the admission that it has nothing to offer and nothing to accomplish. It is tantamount to bankruptcy. This science undertakes to nourish the human mind, but offers stones instead of bread; it wants to uplift and to instruct, and confesses that it has nothing to tell. Amphora coepit institui, currente rota urceus exit. In the beginning a proud consciousness and the promise to be everything to mankind; at the end mental pauperism and scepticism, a caricature of science.

This, then, is the terminal at which the free-thought of subjectivism has arrived: the loss of truth, without which man's mind wanders restlessly and without a goal. That is the penalty for gambling boldly with human perception, the retribution for rebelling against the rights of truth and for the vainglorious arrogance of the intellect, which would draw only from its own cisterns the water of life, while alone those lying deep in the Divine may offer him the eternal fountains of objective truth. Scepticism is gnawing at the mental life of the world. A scepticism cloaked with the names of criticism and research, and of positivism and empiric knowledge, but which, nevertheless, remains what it is, an ominous demon, liberated from the grave into which has been lowered the Christian spiritual life, the spirit of darkness now pervading the world.

In All Directions of the Compass

They have lost their way, puzzled by mazes and perplexed with error they are in hopeless confusion; a correlative of individualistic thinking. If the absolute subject and his experiences of life are the self-appointed court of last resort, the result must be anarchy and not accord. This is manifest; moreover, it is frankly admitted by the spokesmen of freethought.

This anarchy is described in vivid words by Prof. Paulsen, recently the indefatigable champion of freest thought: “We no longer have a Protestant philosophy, in the sense of a standard system. Hegel'sphilosophy was the last to occupy such a position. Anarchy rules ever since. The attempted rally around the name of Kant failed to put an end to the prevalent anarchy, or to the division into small fractions and individualisms. Then there is the mental neurasthenia of our times, the absolute lack of ideas, especially noticeable among so-called educated people… Billboard art has found a counterpart in billboard-philosophy. Here, there, and everywhere we meet the cry: here is the saviour, the secret ruler, the magic doctor, who cures all ills of our diseased age… After a while, the mob has again dispersed and the thing is forgotten” (“Philosophia Militans”).

“There is no uniform philosophic theory of the world, such as we, at least to a certain extent, used to have,” says Paulsen elsewhere, “the latest ideas are diverging in all directions of the compass.”When one buildeth up, and another pulleth down, what profit have they but the labour? (Ecclus. xxxiv. 28). “We have no metaphysics nowadays,” says R. Eucken in the same strain, “and there are not a few who are proud of it. They only would have the right to be so if our philosophy were in excellent shape, if, even without metaphysics, firm convictions ruled our life and actions, if great aims held us together and lifted us above the smallness of the merely human. The fact is an unlimited discordance, a pitiful insecurity in all matters of principle, a defencelessness against the petty human, and soullessness accompanied by superabounding exterior manifestation of life.”

This is the status of modern philosophy and also of liberal, Protestant, theology. Of views of the world, of notions and forms of Christianity, of ideas, essays and contributions to them, there is choice in abundance. Here, materialistic Monism is proclaimed, warranted to solve all riddles. There, spiritualistic Pantheism is retailed in endless varieties. Yonder, Agnosticism is strutting: no longer philosophy, but facts and reality, is its slogan. Then comes the long procession of ethical views of life: “Contemplations of life; theories of human existence surround us and court us in plenty; the coincidence of ample historical learning with active reflection induces manifold combinations, and makes it easy for the individual to draw pictures of this kind according to circumstance and mood; and so we see individual philosophies whirling about promiscuously, winning and losing the favour of the day, and shifting and transmuting themselves in kaleidoscopic change” (Eucken). Hegel, although he lectured with great assurance on his own system, lamented: “Every philosophy comes forth with the pretension to refute not only the preceding philosophy, but to remedy its defects, to have at last found the right thing.” But past experience shows, that to this philosophy, too, the passage from Holy Writ is applicable: “Behold, the feet that will carry thee away are already at the threshold.” Indeed, often it has come to pass that these philosophers themselves bury their ideas, preparatory to entering another camp. Consider the changes that men like Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Strauss, Nietzsche, have essayed in the short course of a few decades, and we are justified in assuming that they would again have changed their last ideas had death not interfered.

Now and then such confusion of opinions is considered an advantage, the advantage of fertility. To be sure, it is fertility, – the fertility of fruitless attempts, of errors, and of fancies, the fertility of disorder and chaos. If this fertility be a cause of pride for science, then mathematics, physics, astronomy, and other exact sciences, are indeed to be pitied for having to forego this fertility of philosophy, and the privilege of being an arena for contradictory views.

Without Peace and without Joy

After the hopeless shipwreck of the modern, godless thought, can we wonder at meeting frequently the despondency of pessimism? Is not pessimism the first born of scepticism? At the close of the nineteenth century we read, again and again, in reviews of the past and forecasts of the future, how the modern world stands perplexed before the riddles of life, confessing in pessimistic mood that it is dissatisfied and unhappy to the depth of its soul. With proud self-consciousness, boasting of knowledge and power of intellect, they had entered the nineteenth century, praising themselves in the words: How great, O man, thou standest at the century's close, with palm of victory in thy hand, the fittest son of time! With heads bowed in shame these same representatives of modern thought make their exit from the same century.

Of the number that voiced this sentiment we quote but one, Prof. R. Eucken, who wrote: “The greatness of the work is beyond doubt. This work more and more opens up and conquers the world, unfolds our powers, enriches our life, it leads us in quick victorious marches from triumph to triumph… Thus, it is true, our desired objects have been attained, but they disclosed other things than we expected: the more our powers and ideas are attracted by the work, the more we must realize the neglect of the inner man and of his unappeased, ardent longing for happiness. Doubts spring up concerning the entire work; we must ask whether the new civilization be not too much a development of bare force, and too little a cultivation of the being, whether because of our strenuous attention to surroundings, the problems of innermost man are not neglected. There is also noticeable a sad lack in moral power: we feel powerless against selfish interests and overwhelming passions: mankind is more and more dividing itself into hostile sects and parties. And such doubts arouse to renewed vigour the old, eternal problems, which faithfully accompany our evolution through all its stages. Former times did not finally solve them, (?) but they were, at least to a degree, mollified and quieted. But now they are here again unmitigated and unobscured. The enigmatical of human existence is impressed upon us with unchecked strength, the darkness concerning the Whence and Whither, the dismal power of blind necessity, accident and sorrow in our fate, the low and vulgar in the human soul, the difficult complications of the social body: all unite in the question: Has our existence any real sense or value? Is it not torn asunder to an extent that we shall be denied truth and peace for ever?.. Hence it is readily understood why a gloomy pessimism is spreading more and more, why the depressed feeling of littleness and weakness is pervading mankind in the midst of its triumphs.”